Irene Dische’s engaging debut novel “The Empress of Weehawken” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; 320 pages; $24) is narrated by a proud, stout-hearted German woman named Elisabeth Rother, who isn’t shy about proclaiming her own Aryan beauty and Catholic devotion as she looks back on her long life.

In her youth, she ran away to be a nurse at the front of World War I and fell in love with a Jewish doctor, who converted to Catholicism and married her. She became Frau Professor Doktor Rother and the mother of a precocious girl who was more connected to her nanny than her demanding but distant mother.

Despite the grand sweep of historical events, Rother’s story focuses on her relationship with her disappointing daughter, Renata, and her granddaughter, who Rother says is even more trouble. After the family flees Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and settles in Weehawken, N.J., Renata doesn’t fall in love with a nice, Catholic American, as her mother wishes. Instead, the narrator says, Renata repeated her mistake by “marrying a Jew” named Dische. Their daughter? Irene Dische, of course.

As I read the novel, I felt a little put off by this technique of having a character with the same name as the author, but who isn’t the narrator. It allows for a reading that reduces the novel to an attempt by the novelist to recapture a connection with her grandmother through empathy. What redeems the book, though, is its utter lack of sentimentality.

Frau Professor Doktor Rother isn’t the most sympathetic of characters. She’s blithely anti-Semitic, racist against African-Americans and snobbish to the nanny and other help.

Yet the promise of the novel is in her startling honesty. Because she can admit these attitudes, readers will know that something will change. That expectation and the novel’s brisk pace — its time period covers nearly the entire 20th century — will keep readers turning pages.

The author has created a character with such a convincing perspective that this passage is quite believable:

“You people! Do not gloat about your youth, because you have a long and treacherous path to negotiate before you reach the truly lovely part of life. Your first decades are one long, tiring, demeaning struggle for at least a short turn at the control lever. Every day you get savaged by your own wishes. … March on to your goal! The magic age of seventy. Then life per se becomes a treasure.”

And I had always thought that life begins at 40.

An especially redeeming and poignant moment comes when Rother, after pages and pages of complaining about Irene — a high school dropout roaming through the Middle East and Africa and having affairs in the 1970s — admits she’s envious of her granddaughter.

This kind of emotional complexity — between Rother and the two girls in her life; between the reader and the book — deepens the novel and shows Dische’s talents at creating vivid and flawed characters who are also true.